When considering the appeal of the New York bagel, one word comes to mind: hot. If you walk into Bagel Hole in Brooklyn, a sign promises Hot Bagels. If you take out a half-dozen or so from Murray's in the West Village, the sack you're carrying will proclaim the presence of Hot Bagels within. Is it true?

Maybe for you, but not for me, not when I visited those shops. In fact, hot bagels—well, really just warm—were on hand at only two of the ten places I checked out. And hot bagels were used on none, and I mean not a single one, of the bagel sandwiches I tried. Perhaps hot bagels are the standard somewhere, but not in New York.

Metaphorically speaking, bagels have never been hotter than they are right now. The partners who operate Black Seed, the new shop in Nolita, first brought Montreal-style bagels—smaller, sweeter, and chewier than New York-style—down from the far north to serve at their Mile End restaurants. Now they're boiling their own. They're impressive enough that the bagel has become the new cupcake, our current carbohydrate craze. The lines that formed shortly after Black Seed opened could have stretched from Calgary to Halifax.

Much more can be learned about the state of the New York bagel by schlepping from bagel shop to bagel shop, which is what I did. This is what I found out:

If you desire a bagel sandwich, and I believe that the nova, cream cheese, and tomato combination on a hot bagel has surpassed pastrami as the iconic sandwich of New York, you're out of luck. The hot-bagel sandwich has become an urban legend, like alligators in the sewers.

You have a decent chance of finding a hot bagel if you show up when doors to bagel shops open, often at 6 a.m. There may be batty bagel eaters who do that, and I salute them, but I prefer to dine during normal hours, from 10 a.m. through mid-afternoon. Allow me a few words about the scorned practice of toasting bagels. I ordered none on this outing, choosing instead to sample my bagels straight out of the bin. I suggest, in light of the extremely limited availability of hot bagels, that we re-consider the shunning of this practice. A toasted bagel is better than a cold bagel every time.

The ten bagel shops I visited, among the most esteemed in New York, double for the most part as snack bars. They offer little more than small tables and a few chairs, and usually not enough of those. They are not about wi-fi and coffee and plopped patrons settling in with computers to take over a table for the day. The dynamic is eat and go. Few have bathrooms. Nobody lingers over coffee, which is understandable, since the coffee is generally terrible.

Often discussed but undocumented is the bloating of the New York bagel. These days, most are so oversized they could double as flotation devices. I asked Juda Engelmayer, until recently the owner of Kossar's on the Lower East Side, if he had any quantitative data on how large the common bagel has become. He said, "They used to be the size of a Dunkin' Donut really, until people wanted big sandwiches in the '70s."

They are now two to three times as large as a Dunkin' Donuts cake donut. They are a casualty of the supersizing of food in America. Among the abundant virtues of the bagels at Black Seed is their modest size, the smallest of all. But I have to concede that even massively outsized ones deserve some praise. They offer bargain-hunting bagel-eaters a lot of bread for their buck.